


Sleepwalking Through Life

by t0talcha0s



Category: BioShock
Genre: Gift Fic, in-game, mentions of blood and murder, sort-of character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-11
Updated: 2017-10-11
Packaged: 2019-01-16 06:11:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12337059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t0talcha0s/pseuds/t0talcha0s
Summary: Every action is done by the urge of another, every memory manipulated by someone, what sort of child does that make?





	Sleepwalking Through Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Schgain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schgain/gifts).



> This is half of an art trade with the wonderful schgain (waterloggedsoliloquy on tumblr) and I urge you go read their work.

There was a board in a room covered in fluttering papers and Jack didn’t quite know what to make of them. There were photos, names he recognized and names he didn’t, and the words scrawled in bright red seemed completely inconsequential. They weren’t though, he could tell that but he didn’t know why. His intestines twirled looking at the board, his left leg a little tingly from the way he landed jumping into this room. He scanned the faces on the wall, he knew Andrew Ryan, he knew Brigid Tenenbaum, Frank Fontaine, two others he was less familiar with but recognized nonetheless. He tried to hold himself steady, his mind was elsewhere trying to understand, treading water and furiously. 

The click and whir of an audio diary, idle hands find occupation, purchase clutching the cool metal of the contraption. Something about a child, a monstrous child, too developed for its time. Still, it was said, disappointment, not quite monstrous enough. Chills up and down Jack’s limbs, goose pimples prick his leg hairs to attention and he is afraid and he is angry and he is unable to express that. 

Another click, another whir, the same familiar man’s voice addressing Jack and to his surprise Jack addresses him back. He is younger, but perhaps as wise. He is crying and Jack’s forehead throbs with memory of this moment, of his puppy. His fingers twitch with muscle memory and he wonders how long ago this could have been and his eyes feel full but refuse to run over. He listens to this moment as he remembers it, feels it so viscerally in his emotions that he wants to cry and pound his fists on the floor but he does neither. 

He deposits the audio diaries gently alongside the others, these are possibly the most valuable. The vacancies in Jack’s understanding are slowly filling, but he is wary of it. He wonders if he could turn around, if he could hoist himself up into that grate again and retrace his steps, back onto a plane, back to his home and his grandparents and a life which made more sense then this did. 

His grandmother used to ask him to go get eggs from their chickens when she was baking wouldn’t she? His grandfather would have him feed the dogs which kept coyotes away from their livestock and he would do it wouldn’t he? Jack couldn’t understand why he couldn’t connect with these memories, why they didn’t lock into his mental conceptions. It felt distant, and these faces on this wall felt omniscient, ever present in his memories despite not being in them. 

Jack knew he had never murdered any of his grandparent’s dogs, he remembered their names and their coats but never had he hurt them. Yet on this recording there he was, him as ever, snapping a dog’s neck at the command of someone who he never imagined would be involved in his life. 

He attempted to shake it off, to ignore what now stabbed behind his eyes and into his memory centers and tingled and tickled and tried to stimulate something he had spent most of his life refusing to acknowledge and shoving deeper into forgetting. 

His feet carried him away from the paper petals outlining something greater then he cared to comprehend, the bubbling fear and anger making his face feel tight and flushed. He could barely comprehend the path he was going but suddenly there was Andrew Ryan in front of him, the patriarch of Rapture. 

He spoke, slowly and dramatically he was a man that loved to present. Jack heard his words, some he barely made note of but others chiseled at something slowly revealing itself in his mind. 

His ears began to ring, violently and suddenly and his vision swirled and disappeared around him, leaving only flashes of visions of what had happened. A child on a table, hooked up to g-d knows what, horrifying, the eyes of a man, the muscles of a teenager, his eyes, his muscles. And beside him, he knew her, he’d heard him, he felt no parental affection for either. He wondered if he should. No, they hadn’t raised him they’d made him. Monster, not monstrous enough, a child, how old was he truly. 

Jack was afraid of what this meant for him, afraid of what he was, angry at what they’d done to him. 

A gun next, his grandmother’s handwriting, that phrase those commands these forgotten memories, how could he have forgotten? Why has he forgotten? And what, that he’d forgotten, had he done? He didn’t like that question, didn’t like the lack of control, the idea that he was 

“Sleepwalking through life” said Andrew, forcing him into the real world, shame welling beneath Jack’s eyes. His mind sputtered and shook at his words, all of the times that phrase was uttered, every string Atlas had pulled, every chosen action. 

Blood on his hands, was it even patricide? 

Another voice again, another father or commander or master 

“Now would you kindly?” 

Anger, fear, the grief of childhood.

“Do you feel claim to Rapture?”

**Author's Note:**

> My tumblr is @barefootcosplayer and your responses are meaningful to me.


End file.
